BRAD HEM, Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle |
December 8, 2007

A Fluor employee works with a computer-aided design program at Fluor's Sugar Land facility.

Photo By JAMES NIELSEN PHOTOS/CHRONICLE

Fluor Corp. has added 1,500 employees locally in the past two years and plans to hire another 700 in 2008 to populate its Sugar Land campus.

SUGAR LAND — The global demand for energy is keeping the Sugar Land offices of international engineering and construction leader Fluor Corp. busy — and growing.

Sugar Land is home to Irving-based Fluor's energy and chemical division, the biggest source of the company's revenue. In 2006, the segment accounted for 38 percent of Fluor's $14.1 billion in revenue.

And it's only becoming more prominent. For the first nine months of 2007, the energy and chemical unit brought in $6 billion, more than half the company's nearly $12 billion in revenue for that time frame.

Sugar Land is at the center of it all. Fluor's campus here has added about 1,500 employees in the past two years, and in 2008 it plans to hire another 700 — mostly engineers — bringing the total head count to 4,500.

"The business is booming," said Fluor vice president Tom Zachman, who heads the local operation. The Sugar Land campus is seeking out engineers from universities around Texas, around the country and around the world.

Although most of the major projects Zachman oversees are built in faraway places like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, they are engineered in Sugar Land, and the Houston suburb is sharing the benefits.

Fluor also recently announced it will move into the former Unocal building in Sugar Land. Local economic development officials had worried the office tower would remain vacant after Chevron bought Unocal and moved those operations downtown, Peschel said.

Growth in the oil and gas sector is helping keep Fluor at the top of the Fortune 500 list of engineering and construction companies. The company also designs and builds just about anything, including U.S. embassies, highways, automobile factories and pharmaceutical plants.

But oil and natural gas remain the company's bread and butter. Fluor counts most of the industry giants — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP and Marathon, among others — as customers.

"We've done work for virtually all of them," Zachman said.

And within the energy sector, Fluor builds, designs and sometimes operates just about any kind of facility, upstream and downstream.

"That's exactly what makes Fluor so strong," said energy analyst Phil Dodge of Stanford Group Co. "If downstream slows down, they shift into upstream. They have that capability."

The boom has fattened stockholders' portfolios. Fluor shares that traded for $20.94 in October 2002 are now worth $158.06, more than a 600 percent gain.

Fluor is working on the $3.8 billion expansion of BP's Whiting, Ind., refinery, which is being fitted to handle heavy Canadian crude.

The flexibility pays off in the power division, too. Zachman recalled the company building more than 50 natural gas-fired plants in the 1990s when coal fell out of favor because of air quality problems. Natural gas has gotten more expensive, so Fluor's customers are turning back to coal — now the low-sulphur variety — and even nuclear power.

If Fluor has a weakness, it's that it is dependent on its clients' growth.

"We're out of business if no one builds anything," Zachman said.

But that doesn't appear to be a problem, Dodge said. With oil prices up, "there is a tremendous amount of capital available to the petroleum companies," he said.